Queer Affects and Big Feelings: On The I Saw the TV Glow Soundtrack
Big Feelings and Critical Nostalgia
Released in January 2024, I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) caused an improbable sensation for an arthouse film that never quite coheres into a recognizable genre. Though horrifying, it can’t be called a horror movie; at the same time, though highly stylized and full of teenaged existentialism, it’s too uniformly unnerving to be legible as an indie coming-of-age story à la Lady Bird or Eighth Grade. Perhaps it is in part this (beautiful, productive) incoherence that resulted in the film’s snubbing during awards season. Nevertheless, it has made an undeniable impact among the queer viewers for whom director Jane Schoenbrun made the film in the first place.
Personally, one of the many reasons this film made my jaw drop is because I recognized something about it: set in a neon suburb during the 1990s, there is something in the way the film treats nostalgia that seems to me a mirror of the ways that young indie rockers have been approaching the past in their music, a similar dynamic to the one I had been observing across the contemporary indie revival, and about which I was writing for my book Big Feelings.
I use the term “Big Feelings” as a purposefully imprecise concept for describing a particular strain in indie rock, a sound oriented towards feminist and queer listeners—as well as young people more generally—in part because its consistent evocations of the 1990s serve more than anything to signal a feeling of non-belonging. Alienated from the promises of the present, young people experiencing chronic climate anxiety, assaults on trans people, and the erosion of abortion rights are making and listening to music that feels nostalgic for a time they never experienced, a kind of fantasy for growing up with a different set of options than the ones we’ve inherited. Such out-of-place/out-of-time feelings, these experiences of temporal dislocation, yearning, and depression, may be increasingly common, but are disproportionately felt by those marginalized from mainstream power: women, racial minorities, and queer folks. As Dan Arthur Levy writes, such “negative affects” in ISTTVG are particularly salient for trans viewers, and demonstrate Schoenbrun’s “t4t affective world,” a project that reaches out to trans viewers through the “coalition-building” and “worldmaking” potential of aesthetic practices.
Years after rock had all but disappeared from the top of the charts, young women and queer musicians like Soccer Mommy, Mitski, Snail Mail, Hop Along, Japanese Breakfast, and boygenius (plus its individual members) have led a resurgence of the genre characterized by timbral evocations of quintessential 90s rock, that ubiquitous sound characteristic of the last time in U.S. history where rock music and popular music were synonymous. These musicians, who were mostly not alive or conscious during the 90s and early 2000s, have been self–reflexively referencing the music of that time period not from a conservative orientation towards what “used to be,” but rather from the position of young people who want a different future from the one being promised by tech monopolies and government death drives alike. In contrast, for example, to what Geoff Mann calls mainstream country music’s “used to” politics—which misreads the past as a lost cultural ideal—Big Feelings uses nostalgia to intentionally fantasize an escape hatch out of a violent and sick world, putting its narrators back in time not to stay there, but so that dreaming of a bright future might be possible for the very first time.
I read ISSTVG as a cinematic corollary to the Big Feelings phenomenon, running in tandem with some of the very musicians it features on its soundtrack in order to do the same kind of work: rather than accurately reflecting life in the 1990s, both the film and its soundtrack recreate a fantasy space, as Schoenbrun describes it, a haunting of the present by the lost possibilities of the past. It is through this ghostly form of what the past felt like—rather than what it was—that young people might explore the questions of identity and belonging that current reality too often forecloses in advance.
The Soundtrack
As feminist scholar and author Raechel Anne Jolie writes, a significant aspect of how ISTTVG works its magic is through its soundtrack, which evokes the 1990s in multiple ways across both content and form—including the very idea that a movie’s soundtrack could become a component of its worldbuilding so compelling as to stand on its own, a trend we haven’t seen since the heyday of films like Clueless, Armageddon, and (paradigmatically) Reality Bites.
Vinyl soundtrack to I Saw the TV Glow (Source)
Released as a $40 double LP in pink vinyl, the soundtrack features many of the same Big Feelings bands emblematic of the indie resurgence—including Bartees Strange, Frances Quinlan, Jay Som, Snail Mail, and more—performing new work commissioned by Schoenbrun specifically for this film. Rather than gathering music actually released in the 1990s, the soundtrack reinforces the film’s overall approach to the past by foregrounding the young, contemporary, and often queer artists pioneering new work today, which recalls the 90s from a place of intentional referentiality. Less important than accurately invoking the decade’s music, it is the perspectives and voices of a current generation, dreaming in the margins, that matters.
Even where music from the past does appear on the soundtrack, it does so via the interpretive work of the cover song. Critically, Snail Mail’s contribution to the project is a cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ canonical “Tonight, Tonight,” which came as a genuine shock to me. For years, I’ve been trying to write about the abstract, sonic influence of the Pumpkins on a younger generation of queer artists, and the reasons why the Pumpkins’ music might speak to young indie rockers some thirty years after the height of the band’s career. Being rather shy, I didn’t plan to interview someone like Lindsey Jordan (Snail Mail), so I had never anticipated having such direct proof of my theory. Whereas I was making the case that you can hear the Pumpkins’ influence in contemporary indie rock’s harmonic vocabulary, here was Jordan giving a much more direct testimony.
And it gets weirder: Schoenbrun cites the Pumpkins’s 1995 double-disk Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a“core influence” on the film, to the extent that its main antagonist is named “Mr. Melancholy.” Moreover, this character’s unsettling appearance immediately invokes the moon from the original “Tonight, Tonight” music video, which in turn was inspired by the classic 1902 film “A Trip to the Moon.” As it turns out, prior to working with Schoenbrun on the film, Jordan had already been covering “Tonight, Tonight” live, and sported a moon tattoo inspired by both the Pumpkins and Georges Méliès’s film alike.
At the same time, nonbinary Singaporean artist yeule (Nat Ćmiel)—who covers Broken Social Scene for the soundtrack—was also on record as a Pumpkins fan, joining other young indie bands like Wednesday, who covered the Pumpkins’ “Perfect” on 2022’s Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up. About that song, they’ve said, “if you listen to Wednesday’s original music it goes without saying that the Pumpkins discography (at least ‘til 1998) is a sound we reference often and tether ourselves to.”
All of this might seem a bit strange to readers who remember the Pumpkins generally—and Billy Corgan specifically—as iconoclasts, the kinds of alt-rock discontents who were constantly in the tabloids evincing not particularly feminist views around their interactions with people like Courtney Love and D’Arcy Wretzky. Making matters worse, decades after the band regularly appeared in gossip columns, Corgan joined conspiracy theorist and fascist reactionary Alex Jones’s show to compare “social justice warriors” to the KKK , returning subsequently to fundraise against the Clinton campaign, and later telling Howard Stern that he’d once seen a human shapeshift before his eyes.
Feminist philosopher Robin James has recently argued that prominent 90s alt bands like the Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails demonstrate a kind of “wounded entitlement” that mirrors “contemporary alt-right movements [that] use claims of personal injury to go viral and create media spectacles drawing disproportionate attention to their causes.” From this perspective, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Corgan both presage and consolidate masculine and specifically Midwestern grievance. With Nine Inch Nails being from Cleveland and the Pumpkins being from Chicago, James is thinking through how they help to articulate the attachment between “white working class” sentiments and reactionary politics, a persistent topic of media fascination even this late into the Trump era.
As a Pumpkins fan from age nine—but also a feminist scholar—I agree wholeheartedly with James’s analysis, making it fair to wonder: how could someone like Billy Corgan—who denounced anti-Trump protestors and who owns a professional wrestling company, who seems to use his genuine boyhood traumas as justifications for reactionary bigotry rather than an opportunity to connect with others—become a source of such powerful inspiration for not only queer indie musicians like Jordan, but also Jane Schoenbrun, who structured the Pumpkins into the very bones of their allegory of trans life? Jordan and Schoenbrun describe their mutual admiration of the Pumpkins as something of a happy coincidence, and while on some level that’s surely true, I also think there’s more to the story.
Queer Affects and the Re-Making of Rock Music
I argue that the Pumpkins’ music produces queer affects that resonate with listeners despite and sometimes in outright contradiction to any literal worldview expressed by the band. Often, an artist’s politics align easily with the music they produce; but the Pumpkins’ discography is rather more contradictory, filled with sentimental longing, romantic paeans, and hard-driving rock anthems alike. Though there are many different theories of “affect,” all agree that the force of something can hit us in a pre-rational way, as when we involuntarily jump at the sound of a slamming door. Here, I suggest that the wistful yearning and complex emotionality of the Pumpkins’ songs hits our bodies first. Before we learn about (or remember, or pay attention to) Corgan’s reactionary views, many of us have already begun to hear something in the chords and timbres that affirms our ambivalent experience of the world: alienated but desiring, despairing because loving.
In a variety of ways and with a variety of results, what the Pumpkins did more than anything was center performances of feelings in ways that I suggest are particularly noticeable for queer and feminist listeners. In a patriarchal culture that punishes men for emoting in public, the Pumpkins sold T-shirts with hearts literally printed on the sleeves, made music about love so powerful it could reshape your entire life. Though Corgan’s lyrics often can be read as performances of wounded masculinity—and though his guitar solos can sometimes reinforce this view—he also championed an approach to emotion that was unapologetically earnest, no matter how “cringey” the result. As much as any myopic indulgence, these queer affects too are a legacy of the Pumpkins’ music, caught between vulnerable openness and defensive ego, holding open a perpetual ambiguity and therefore the possibility of either destruction or redemption.
These are the exact same dynamics we can hear (albeit in a different style) in Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” a wistful and bittersweet rush that foregrounds some of the same extended chord tones (particularly the Major 7 and 9) that help differentiate the Pumpkins from their alt-rock siblings, adding nuance and complexity to the ways their songs resonate with people. Now canonical among a younger generation of queer listeners, Broken Social Scene’s 2002 You Forgot it in People was one of the only records during that period’s indie revival (think The Strokes and The White Stripes) to make sensitive music that spoke directly to people not often addressed directly by rock culture. “I’m Still Your Fag,” whispers one song, ever so gently; “Pitter Patter Goes My Heart,” answers another.
The legacy of this kind of sweeping and emotional indie music isn’t just alive in the young artists who populate the ISTTVG soundtrack; they’re also actively reworking it in profound new ways. When musicians like Jay Som and Phoebe Bridgers make music that evokes 90s alt-rock, they creatively appropriate the sonic markers of a genre associated in public consciousness with white-male pain, turning it toward their own purposes. They use it, in other words, to express the feelings, struggles, and joys of communities that were left out of alt-rock’s initial heyday, making music “they never got to have.” That’s why there are only two covers on the soundtrack, framing the record, rather than characterizing it. That’s why the music isn’t reducible to 90s nostalgia, but starts there and runs with it. In spite of all the film’s and the soundtrack’s references to the past, it’s these young artists who are transforming its legacies for a new generation.
Jane Schoenbrun set out to “make a great teen angst movie” with “great teen angst music.” All teens have angst, but women and queer teens experience more than their fair shares. Commissioning and compiling music that continues to speak to them, that performs their orientations in public, is the ultimate project I hear in “Big Feelings,” an indie rock sensibility specifically foregrounding the importance, the lifegiving necessity, of bearing witness to one’s emotions, no matter how overwhelming. Together with its soundtrack, I Saw the TV Glow reaches out to help people find one another so that this witnessing might be done together, in community.
